As I, as a worker, came to know them, the aims of German trade unions were political, and there were a number of various trade unions with varied political views. |
I was elected to the Diet in the same way as at every parliamentary election. |
I had repeatedly made written requests to the Fuehrer that I might be allowed to join the Wehrmacht as an ordinary soldier. He refused to give me this permission. |
I joined the Party definitely in 1923 after having already been in sympathy with it before. |
In my Gau, as far as I know, only Communists who had actually worked against the State were arrested. |
Although as a sailor I despised politics - for I loved my sailor's life and still love it today - conditions forced me to take up a definite attitude towards political problems. |
When she became very ill with heart trouble, I saw that it would be impossible for my parents to provide for my studies, and I obtained their permission to go to sea to make a career for myself there. |
My connection with the Reich Ministers was of a purely official nature and was very infrequent. |
Many years before I had left a beautiful country and a rich nation and I returned to that country six years later to find it fundamentally changed and in a state of upheaval, and in great spiritual and material need. |
I attended the elementary school at Schweinfurt and the secondary school. |
The controversies between the proletariat and the middle class had to be smoothed out and bridged over by each getting to know and understand the other. |
I was never informed in advance about the start of the war or about foreign political developments. |
As regards personal relationships I cannot say that I had any particularly personal intercourse with anyone. |
One day I heard a speech of Hitler. In this speech he said that the German factory worker and the German labourer must make common cause with the German intellectual worker. |
I could not have the honour of being a German soldier because of my imprisonment in the First World War. And in this world war the Fuehrer refuses to allow me to serve as a soldier. |
As a cabin boy on a Norwegian sailing ship I earned five kronen a week in addition to my keep. |
The Diet was dissolved by a Reich Government decree. |
Through the Young Men's Christian Association and principally in Australia and North America, as well as in South America, I came into contact with families of these countries. |
I am very proud of the fact that many workers in my Gau, numerous former Communists and Social Democrats were won over by us and became local group leaders and Party functionaries. |
The dissolution of the trade unions was in the air then. |